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Featured in Development

As part of our core values of sharing knowledge, the InfoQ editors were keen to capture and share our book and article recommendations for 2018, so that others can benefit from this too. In this second part we are sharing the final batch of recommendations

Featured in Architecture & Design

Tanya Reilly discusses her research into how the fire code evolved in New York and draws on some of the parallels she sees in software. Along the way, she discusses what it means to be an SRE, what effective aspects of the role might look like, and her opinions on what we as an industry should be doing to prevent disasters.

Featured in Culture & Methods

Mik Kersten has published a book, Project to Product, in which he describes a framework for delivering products in the age of software. Drawing on research and experience with many organisations across a wide range of industries, he presents the Flow Framework™ as a way for organisations to adapt their product delivery to the speed of the market.

Featured in DevOps

The fact that machine learning development focuses on hyperparameter tuning and data pipelines does not mean that we need to reinvent the wheel or look for a completely new way. According to Thiago de Faria, DevOps lays a strong foundation: culture change to support experimentation, continuous evaluation, sharing, abstraction layers, observability, and working in products and services.

What Social Networks Are Teaching Us About Data Portability

As more social networking sites are popping up, the questions around the data they keep are rising. Data portability has become the watch phrase across the Web 2.0 world. Is there something to be learned about data access and portability from these services?

Several of the major Web 2.0 players and services have made announcements about making the data they store "available" to the users who own it or aggregating access to data from other services. MySpace, Yahoo, eBay, Twitter, and Photobucket agreed to a partnership under the MySpace Data Availability initiative. Facebook announced their Facebook Connect technology to allow members to access their profile data from places other than Facebook. Google launched the preview release of Friend Connect that will allow users to see and interact across several social networks. Friendfeed released an API to allow programatic access to their multi-site aggregation capabilities.

In the background, but moving to the forefront, The DataPortability Project has been bringing together partners, technology, principles, and practices to make data portability and ownership a priority and an achievable goal. Their organization mission is

The DataPortability Project is a group created to promote the idea that individuals have control over their data by determining how they can use it and who can use it. This includes access to data that is under the control of another entity.

DataPortability listed the main points of their philosophy as:

You should be able to decide what you do with that data and how it gets used by others

Open Source solutions are preferred to closed source proprietary solutions

Bottom-up distributed solutions are preferred to top down centralized solutions

While these technologies have been strongly tied to social networking, they have also been picking up usage in other areas as well. OAuth has been making inroads with Google Data APIs and Yahoo Fire Eagle API. Spring Security (Acegi) added OpenID support. Most all of the major browsers have already added or announced microformat support of one kind or another.

The growth in interest and technologies surrounding data availability, portability, and aggregation has ramifications on design and development of applications outside the social network space. The more that Software-as-a-Service and cloud computing are picked as enterprise and application models, the more distributed systems become. The distribution can lead to much more decentralization, even beyond the enterprise/organizational boundaries. This can be seen in healthcare with the rise of the Personal Health Record (PHR). With names like Google and Microsoft announcing PHR offerings over the web, data portability and availability will start hitting home with many more people than just those on social networking sites.

The challenge that the Data portability movement is attempting to address is closely paralleled by the evolution of the Personal Health Record in the healthcare industry. We will want to own our own health information, but we will need to be able to share that information with medical providers and others. We will need a universal ability to share information, but share it securely. At the same time the process of managing access will need to be easy. We can learn an awful lot from the simple approaches that characterize OpenID, OAuth, microformats and other pervasive technologies that have succeeded on the Web.